In an oddly spectacular career, Willem Dafoe was film’s
best Jesus (in Martin Scorsese’s The Last
Temptation of Christ), and a startling Satan (in Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist). His earnest humanity as
motel manager Bobby, in Sean Baker’s The
Florida Project, was so far from his demonic Bobby Peru in David Lynch’s Wild at Heart. Julian Schnabel’s At Eternity’s Gate treats, as the title
suggests, Vincent Van Gogh (Dafoe) as modern art’s most heroic, sacrificial genius. In
an asylum discussion with a worried priest (Mads Mikkelsen), ex-preacher Vincent
offers his rough-hewn gospel of pantheist art: “To me God is nature, and nature
is beauty.” That testament will, for many in our fractious world, suffice.

The story concerns Vincent’s last years, so productive
even as his mind fell apart. Schnabel, a painter whose thick impasto rivals
Vincent’s, piles on his reverence a bit thickly, using some lens distortion to underscore
emotions, but also makes some classy choices (like avoiding the melodrama of
the famous ear-slashing by exploring the pathos of motivation). He doesn’t over-sell
the famous landscapes and sites in Arles, France, where the Dutchman found painterly
heaven and social hell, abandoned even by Paul Gauguin. Schnabel lets the
pictures, and Dafoe’s life-mapped face and sincere voice, deliver the goods. Rather
pointless is the rant of a mad inmate at the St. Remy asylum (for that to work,
we’d need Goya behind the camera).

For me, every artist film echoes the painterly trio of
my late childhood: Vincente Minnelli’s Lust
for Life (with Kirk Douglas’s Vincent, very brave work for a macho star),
John Huston’s Moulin Rouge (José
Ferrer as sardonic Toulouse-Lautrec) and Ronald Neame’s The Horse’s Mouth (Alec Guinness amazing as painter-rascal Gulley
Jimson). But Dafoe and Schnabel (Before
Night Falls, Basquiat) do one thing better than those. They provide a
persistent, fascinating sense of Vincent’s work, a driven process of exploration
and redemption (removing old boots, and revealing toe-less socks, he then
paints the boots). Van Gogh, a late bloomer in art, explosively extruded
himself onto canvas. His passionate, vulnerable hunger for truth empowers this
movie, which may have too many words but often has good ones (mostly from
Vincent’s letters).

Valuable are Oscar Isaac as Gauguin (if not with Anthony
Quinn’s fierce virility in Lust for Life)
and Rupert Friend as Vincent’s ever-loving brother, Theo. Dafoe’s open, earthy
visage expresses the angels of Vincent’s artistic mission, and the demons of
his tormented mind. Once more the actor carries a big cross, to another kind of
immortality.

The Favourite

On the IMDB info site, the “Plot Keywords” for TheFavourite
are lesbian, lesbian sex, lesbian kiss, female nudity and gay interest. None of
that keeps Yorgos Lanthimos’s lavish history dramedy from seeming rather
pointless. I did feel the pathos of England’s Queen Anne (Olivia Colman) loving
her royal rabbits, her compensation for
having lost 17 children. The bunny queen is herself a sad child, a food pig and
a raging ninny, hobbled by gout. The last Stuart monarch (1702-1714) had
Britain’s greatest general, John Churchill, who became the first Duke of
Marlborough after crushing the French, but he is barely seen, like the vapor of
a Marlboro man.

Instead, plenty of big tapestries, bird shooting, ludicrous
dancing, beatings, the pelting of a fat, nude man with oranges, and all those
lesbian yummies. Rachel Weisz is Sarah, bossy royal favorite (oops, favourite) or, in today’s gracious argot, stone-cold power bitch. Her upstart rival is kitchen maid turned Machiavellian sex
kitten Abigail (Emma Stone). Both please Anne in hidden, lustful ways, while men
peacock around under vast wigs of curled hair. The split music score (18th
century palace baroque, plus modern “ironic” percussion) is matched by dialog like
“Anyway, think on it. No pressure” (first part dimly Old England, second part
definitely not). Fisheye lenses puff the big rooms and gaudy, ponderous rituals.
Far too lacking is the jolly fun of Tom
Jones (1963), although Tom’s fun hardly deserved four Oscars.

SALAD (A List)

Remarkable
Films About Famous Painters
In order of arrival, with their star:

A
pretty fair painter himself, Orson Welles put art at the center of his
late-career essay film F for Fake, a
witty doodle-fest about magic, fraud, art mania and impish master forger Elmyr
de Hory. “Every true artist,” Welles remarked, “must, in his own way, be a
magician, a charlatan. Picasso once said he could paint fake Picassos as well
as anybody, and someone like Picasso could say something like that and gets
away with it. But an Elymr de Hory? Elmyr is a profound embarrassment to the
art world, a man of talent making monkeys out of those who have disappointed
him (by never liking his ‘original’ art).” (Quote from Frank Brady’s Citizen Welles.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

“Writer
Ian Christie called Alec Guinness’s painter Gulley Jimson ‘one of the few
authentic artist characters in British or any other cinema’ … The scamp Jimson
is soul-fraternal with Van Gogh, who confided to his brother Theo, ‘Who am I in
the eyes of most people? A nonentity or an oddity or a disagreeable person,’
but then added with Jimsonian fortitude that ‘through my work I’d like to show
what there is in the heart of such an oddity, such a nobody.” (From the Alec
Guinness/The Horse’s Mouth chapter of
my book Starlight Rising, available via
Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

Friday, December 14, 2018

Maria by
Callas: In Her Own WordsOr should that be “in her own notes”?
Of course, her immortal composers were Verdi, Bellini, Puccini, Donizetti,
Bizet etc. But the voice was Maria Callas, one of the great opera names in our increasingly
crass world. Opera buff and French photographer Tom Volf’s tribute is a fan’s
scrapbook, using clips, letters, home movies, diaries, interviews, memoirs and
five complete arias.

The triumph here goes beyond musical passages caught
on film (some are poignantly without direct sound, the recorded singing poured
over flickering images). It is also in seeing La Callas the perfectionist
remain Maria the woman. The New York-born teen was pressed into ruthless
training by her Greek mother. At first pudgy, she became a willowy beauty (yet with
a famously big nose). There is a tender tiny bit, post-performance, when Maria passes
a flower girl and reaches out to fondly lift her chin – the kid has a long
nose.

She was loved for truly acting her roles, with urgently expressive power (and, this being
opera, some ham). Becoming a diva made her act offstage, too. Speaking French fluently
(not much Italian beyond opera), she put a toity British glazing on her English
in Europe. But listen to the New Yawk tones
bursting out, when she confronts the swarming Chicago press: “I cannot do those
lousy performances!” As her fat, avuncular
husband became a grasping manager, Maria was shedding weight to look like
Audrey Hepburn (an international female tendency of the era). She fell very
hard for Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis, writing of him like a Homeric
god: “There was Aristo, contemplating the dark sea.” Ari, passionate but not very
aristo, later turned his sun-baked charisma to newly widowed Jacqueline Kennedy.
Jackie flickers by, for in this movie Callas is the only star. Other celebs are
mere sparklers.

She could be difficult and had famous, abrupt cancellations,
the worst in Rome. Nerves and temper frayed long before the voice aged (she was
savvy about her adoring, late-career fan base: “They were probably applauding
what they hoped to hear”). Callas wrote
plaintively to Onassis, “I am shy and rather strange,” yet we often observe a proud
but vulnerable character, never intellectual
(few singers are) but rich in thoughtful feeling. And her soul sang. Never was
she more beautiful than in a televised concert singing “Casta Diva” from
Bellini’s Norma. Her arms enfold her
red-gowned torso as if to embrace and channel the gorgeous sound. One hand’s long,
slender fingers spread over her heart. Even a deaf person, watching, must feel
her art.

Green Book

The lessons of the civil rights movement (epic phase:
1954 to ’68) remain very relevant. Few have arrived with the entertainment kick of
Green Book. The reality-based movie depicts
the working relation and then friendship of black pianist Don Shirley and white
employee Tony “Lip” Vallelonga (not to be confused with Jose de Vilallonga, the
Brazilian smoothie of Breakfast at
Tiffany’s). It is Tiffany’s time,
early 1960s, and suave conservatory grad “Doctor” Shirley hires Copacabana club
bouncer Tony as chauffeur and bodyguard. Their tour from New York into the explicitly racist
Deep South impresses rich whites with Don’s special style, a kind of virtuoso
cocktail-classical. His command of jazzy standards, show tunes and Chopin riffs
gains more power as Don finds his inner soul brother, with unexpected help from
the also evolving goomba Tony.

At the core is a counterpoint. Don Shirley is played dapper
and “dicty” (a black term of the era, for pretentiously fancy Negroes) by lean
Mahershala Ali. As Ali slowly reveals the inner yearnings of the lonely elitist, Viggo Mortensen’s
Tony has the best Yankee slob’s Old South time since Joe Pesci in My Cousin Vinny. The tour is a softer,
but not toothless, variant on the risky Jim Crow-era travels of Nat King Cole
and Louis Armstrong. Mortensen, here bulked into a meat slab both amiable and
menacing, fortunately does not repeat his fabled nude scene in 2007’s Eastern Promises. Partly written by
Tony’s now almost elderly son Nick, this film advances director Peter Farrelly past minor tankers like The Three Stooges and Dumb and Dumber To. There are crackling
lines and mean crackers, and sharp work from Linda Cardellini as Lip’s back-home wife
and Dmitri Marinov (a former concert violinist) as the cellist in Don’s trio.

Here is the time when blacks used the Negro Motorists
Green Book to find cheap (but safely welcoming) motels, and the rich stream of
period tunes is not just a Dick Clark platter party. Visit You Tube’s video
“The Times and Trials of Donald Walbridge Shirley,” and you realize some of his
lippy flamboyance has been ironed out (partly to cover a plot surprise). But he
and Tony make a terrific, even poignant duo. And one must relish any movie that
salutes both Little Richard and the original
KFC.

WINE (Vin
Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Racism
in 1941 Hollywood was the key reason Orson Welles’s Latin American solidarity
film It’s All True was derailed by
RKO and chief instigator (and RKO investor) Nelson Rockefeller. They feared
“that Welles had gotten dangerously off-track. His Rio movie was lionizing the working
class jangadeiros (fishermen) and the
Afro-Brazilians of the favelas
(slums). The studio cut funds and stopped sending raw stock.” Welles, soon
after returning, was fired. Evidently these mentors simply overlooked Orson’s
famous “voodoo” Macbeth and Native Son (and 23 blacks appeared in Citizen Kane). Welles took small, impish
revenge in The Lady from Shanghai,
where the odious snoop Grisby (Glenn Anders) uses Rockefeller’s flippant trademark
“fella.” (Quote from Mary Jo McConway’s new book The Tango War.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

The
heart, soul and finest New York skyscraper of Fur is Nicole Kidman, as Diane Arbus: “Genaro Molina’s 1997 Oscars
photo captured Nicole, lofty above Tom Cruise, her snow-fleshed beauty in a
Galliano absinthe-green gown. It’s hard to square that image with the woman who
once told reporter Lee Grant, ‘I was an usherette in Sydney. I cleaned toilets.
I never think of how I look.’ Director Baz Luhrmann (during Moulin Rouge) saw how ‘she loved to be
photographed. She could inhabit the space by making a heightened image and fill
the set with emotional energy.’ Still, Kidman battled inhibition, and director
Jonathan Glazer (Birth) detected ‘a
very powerful inner life going on.” (From the Nicole Kidman/Fur chapter of my book Starlight Rising, available through
Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

Friday, December 7, 2018

This week, two American families in trouble, with a
smart son at the emotional center:

Wildlife

The 1950s have been retro-packed as a conformity trunk, crammed
with Ike Era “lives of quiet desperation” liberated by Brando, Dean,
Elvis, then JFK. There is a more subtle approach, as in Carol. And now, even more subtle, Wildlife. We briefly hear Jack Kennedy’s voice, but the first Hit
Parade croon-tune doesn’t sound until half an hour in. The struggling Brinson
family’s TV is “on the fritz” in their humble new rental in Great Falls,
Montana. Lovely mountains loom, but so do advancing forest fires, as the
Brinsons crack into crisis.

Jerry (Jake Gyllenhaal) is an eager-beaver who loses
his job as golf pro at the club (too chummy, not servile enough for the boss). Pro
golf never welcomed Jerry, and now his hard-trying wife Jeanette (Carey Mulligan) turns
bored and resentful as Jerry can’t find a job (evidently the streetcar
named Desire has dropped this marriage from its route). Watching at the anxious
hub is Joe, 14 (Ed Oxenbould), bright and mannerly, his calm, wise face anticipating how he will look at 40. Jerry, feeling useless as Jeanette becomes
a swim instructor and Joe takes an after-school job at a photo shop, goes away to toil on the fire line for a dollar an hour.
Jeanette and Joe drive up to see the fire, a fiery foreshadowing
of the film’s best sequence.

Jeanette meets Warren Miller, 50-ish, rich in a quiet
way, separated and on the prowl. “He wants to learn about poetry,” she tells
Joe, but Warren’s chosen poem is her pale, lovely body. Over dinner, the portly
smoothie (Bill Camp is superb) launches what you might call elite-Rotarian
seduction tactics as Joe observes, stunned. Warren lifts a toast to “your old
man not burning up like a piece of bacon.” That brings a funny-queasy, David
Lynch shiver, and if it doesn’t revive your old, adolescent thoughts about weird
adults, you’re amnesiac. Actor Paul Dano, who directed (and with Zoe Kazan adapted
a Richard Ford novel), builds surefire tones and moods along with Diego Garcia's softly colored, velvety, faintly nostalgic images (two shots of the bus
station, at dusk and morning, typify his mastery). The story has one burst of fierce
melodrama, entirely earned.

Of the leads Mulligan and Gyllenhaal are remarkable.
Oxenbould is crucial, as the story breathes through Joe’s maturing mind. The
young actor is never cute or off-center or obvious. His fretful, half-aroused, embarrassed
voyeurism echoes Kyle McLachlan’s Jeffrey in Lynch’s Blue Velvet. More delicate and intimately spooky, Wildlife is not a dream world. It delves
into one of the life-shaping crises that come to many young people, in countless
variations of the real.

Boy Erased

As Marshall, a Bible-thumping minister
in Boy Erased, Russell Crowe doesn’t
mind splitting his life between his successful church and running a large car
dealership. But he can’t stand the more testing split in his teen son Jared
(Chris Hedges). Earnest, pensive Jared is gay but fighting it, after countless
warnings of hellfire (the family acts if Satan is venting lava right into their
home). Getting out of his closet is tough; even worse is his dad being so closed.
Wife and mother Nancy (Nicole Kidman) is devoted to them both, and her sensitive
Christian values makes her torn feelings very moving. Kidman, an Aussie playing
an Arkansan, is once again among our most subtle stars. Crowe, now so chunky
he’s darn-near cherubic, seems stuffed by pious bewilderment.

Jared’s shy but deep interest in boys is admitted, with
guilt. Since candid, patient compassion is flagellated by fears of sin, the
“solution” is to send Jared to a “conversion camp,” Love in Action. The action is led by the
Lord’s own drill sergeant, Vic Sykes, played by director and adapter (from
Garrard Conley’s memoir) Joel Edgerton. Sykes, evidently a bit shaky in his own
sexuality, pesters, pleads and bullies. A big, silent boy is driven into
despair. The place is a prison of willfully ignorant therapy, where adolescence
faces the extra torment of a crudely judgmental belief system.

Boy Erased is stretched and stylized for menace, at times like a fright movie. Edgerton, like Dano a
fine actor and now director, lifts it above some routine passages, due partly
to Chris Hedges’s unusually micro-tuned intensity. I thought Hedges was better
as the nephew in Manchester by the Sea
than Oscar-winning Casey Affleck as his grief-glutted uncle. Not great drama, nor
working at Wildlife level, this film
has an intelligent moral compass, magnetized by excellent performers.

Arnold
Weissberger, Orson Welles’s lawyer in the Citizen
Kane period, was essential to RKO’s embattled defense as publisher William
Randolph Hearst threatened to quash 1941’s most brilliant movie. All was at
stake: “Weissberger suspected that Hearst would not actually go through with a
suit, for fear of having to testify in court about his extramarital
relationship with Marion Davies. One of Weissberger’s colleagues suggested
threatening Hearst with publicly disclosing that, in Mexico, Marion Davies had
covertly given birth to twins. The birth certificate could be produced.
Hearst’s greatest weapon was not a lawsuit, or even the threat of one, but the implicit,
massive threat of using the power of the press to harass the entire film
industry.” Without a Davies scandal, Kane
was released but Hearst vindictiveness undermined income. (Quote from Barbara
Leaming’s Orson Welles: A Biography.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

Jackie Brown was a lovingly uplifted tribute to blaxploitation, the
’60s into ’70s genre that made Pam Grier a star, though it often settled for
pulp: “Most blaxplo was opportunistic and transgressive, causing white critics
to shrink into their seats while black viewers had too much fun to care. There
was biracial uneasiness with race-and-rape fantasies (Mandingo, Drum, Goodbye Uncle Tom), a sub-genre of provocation that
Tarantino would later stylize terminally (Django
Unchained). Blaxploitation’s nadir was the Italian parable Black Jesus, a crass conflation of
African political martyr Patrice Lumumba with Christ, starring John Ford’s
black mainstay Woody Strode. As a film historian put it: ‘Valerio Zurlini’s
film was acquired by a small American distributor, Plaza Pictures, dubbed into
English, shortened to play down the Lumumba aspects, and given the American
title Black Jesus.” (From the Pam
Grier/Jackie Brown chapter of my book
Starlight Rising, available from
Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

Friday, November 30, 2018

In a brief prelude, director-writer Steve McQueen calls
Widows his “passion project.” That
reveals the movie’s double edge: a labor of love, long nurtured, but also a ramped-up
commercial package. McQueen, whose grip on historical saga was acute (if
drawn-out) in 12 Years a Slave, has
made an absorbing thriller that uses an impressively tight cast in often superb
locations. As a former Chicagoan (18 years), I think this may be the best Chicago
display platform since The Untouchables
(1987) and The Fugitive (1993).

Viola Davis, now 53, is a vulnerable, motivated action
pivot as Veronica, suddenly cast into the deep. She lives in a lakefront Mies
high-rise and adores husband Harry (Liam Neeson). He has the money, plus high
connections on both sides of the law. Harry’s a thief. His crowning heist, of a
rising South Side gangster, goes right but then fatally wrong. Widow Veronica is
pushed hard for the stolen $2 million by the gangster’s sado-goon. Elevated
from a 1983 TV series, the story is layered by writer Gillian Flynn as a
deep-dish Chicago pizza of threat, fear and money-mad fatality.

The gang king Manning (Brian Tyree Henry) is running
for alderman. This enrages the ward’s old, white-racist boss, Tom (Robert
Duvall), who plans to bestow the seat on son Jack (Colin Farrell), a sleek
opportunist but soon disgusted by dad’s fossilized corruption. Plot victuals include
an on-the-make gospel preacher, an old bowling alley sharpie, the wanton police
killing of a black youth, rude rap music (but also Nina Simone), Veronica’s
endangered fluff-ball dog and a volcanic f-spew by Duvall.

Angry and desperate, Veronica takes charge. She
recruits two other new widows and a zippy young street fox (Cythia Erivo), to
stage a payback heist. Here, I think, McQueen slips a little. Powerhouse Viola
Davis is left too often to simmer in mournful funk (fed by erotic flashbacks to
Harry). Not enough textured fill is given to tall, Polish-American beauty
Alice, a virtual high-rise unto herself, though Elizabeth Debicki is a wow widow
(with aspects of Jennifer Lawrence, who passed on this film). Strong but under-used
is action trouper Michelle Rodriguez as Linda, harried mom and widow. A
surprise reveal comes around an hour in, not divulged here, but if you are hip
to the ritual games of star-ego casting you might expect it.

Widows is a big, vivid tapestry with threaded debts to auteurs
Tarantino, Scorsese, Mann, Russell, Coppola and Spike Lee. It isn’t a great
heist movie, but McQueen crafts plenty of urban tension and crackle. His savvy is
not too cynical, and his female empowerment zeal is (for a guy) nuanced. Softies
won’t like the best sicko bowling alley scene since There Will Be Blood. But the fluffy pooch is a survivor.

Can You
Ever Forgive Me?Lee Israel wrote popular
biographies of Tallulah Bankhead and Dorothy Kilgallen. By 1991 her failure
with beauty stylist Estee Lauder led to Lee’s rejection by her editor. Lauder
did zero for her. As played with acerbic pathos by Melissa McCarthy, in Can You Ever Forgive Me?, she often
looks (floppy mop of brown hair, bulging coats over bulky bod) like a rusted
tank from the Maginot Line. But despair, marinated in booze, brings
inspiration. Lee begins faking typed, signed notes by the famous, like Tallulah,
Kate (Hepburn), Louise (Brooks) and Dorothy (Parker). Most are juiced by Lee’s
tangy verve (“Caustic wit is my religion”), though foolish candor in a Noël
Coward scribble would bring the law to her door. By then she had sold over 400 notes
to New York dealers eager to be impressed (for profit).

McCarthy, a comical ace (who can forget her SNL spiking of Sean Spicer?), introduces
Lee as a frumpy, sour, alcoholic loner, her lesbian lover long gone. She
becomes a rather endearing desperado. Forgery
is her forge of income, and her flag of effrontery. It also leads to snarky mischief
with gay rascal and bar barnacle Jack Hock. That would be England’s Richard E.
Grant, in an old-rake extension of his breakthrough role as a hell-raiser in Withnail and I (1987). Sponger, cokehead,
boy-cruiser, Jack is often a cultural dunce. It’s 1991, he’s around 60, but gay
Jack doesn’t know that “Marlene” is the divine Mahr-lay-na Dietrich, idol of sophisticated gays for his entire
youth. The two scampy scroungers flash some sparkle, accentuated by a classic
song-track (Billie Holiday, Blossom Dearie and Dinah Washington were Lee’s nostalgia
sirens of “a better time and place”).

Director Marielle Heller firmly hits notes both glum
and bright, tucking McCarthy and Grant into intimate rhythms, hip but not campy.
Fine support comes from three women: Dolly Wells as Lee’s most sympathetic
buyer, Jane Curtin as her hard-baked editor, and Anna Deavere Smith as her
unsentimental past lover. The film is a crusty munchie with soft insides, based
on Lee’s acclaimed memoir (she died in 2014). With its wry, melancholy charm it
joins the eccentric family of movies about New York dreamers and scrape-alongs:
The Cruise, The Producers, Mac, Broadway
Danny Rose, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Norman, A Fine Madness, They All Laughed, Midnight
Cowboy, Joe Gould’s Secret and Next
Stop, Greenwich Village.

SALAD (A Memorial
List)

Bernardo Bertolucci died in Rome on Monday at 77.
Perhaps the most inspired visual sensualist since Joseph von Sternberg, the daring
director gave Italian style a new international luster and scooped up Oscars
for The Last Emperor. He also provided
Marlon Brando his last great role (Paul in Last
Tango in Paris). Here, by my order of preference, are Bertolucci’s best: The Conformist (1970), Last Tango in Paris (1972), The Last Emperor (1987), Before
the Revolution (1964), Luna (1979), Besieged
(1995), 1900 (1976), Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man (1981), The Spider’s Stratagem (1970), The Dreamers (2003), The Sheltering Sky (1970).

WINE (Vin
Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Laurence
Olivier sought to fire Orson Welles as director during their 1960 staging of Rhinoceros, quite some change after an
earlier, fawning letter: “Darling boy (Welles was 44), I have wanted to pick
you up and swing you round and dance you up and down on my knee and even go
birds-nesting with you in some tiny measure, to show you how adorably sweet and
generous was your dear thought.” The “dear thought” which sparked this effusion
“was the loan of a refrigerator.” Olivier’s compliments often arrived like
Shakespeare, drunk, falling into a fruit salad, although he (like Orson)
offered many proofs of preferring women to darling boys. (Quotes from Philip
Ziegler’s book Olivier.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

Just
before filming his splendid Philip Marlowe in his best film, Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye in 1972, Elliott
Gould’s star value “suddenly shrank. The breakup with Barbra Streisand and drug
use (acid etc.) left him raw (‘I didn’t have a drug problem, I had a reality
problem’). He absented himself from A
Glimpse of Tiger, Warners shut it down, and Gould paid a big forfeit
penalty. At least he had his name back: ‘What really got me down was the loss
of my second name – I was either Mr. Streisand or Elliott Who?’ But Altman’s
movie was a karmic rebound, and came on good wheels: Gould owned the 1948
Lincoln driven by Marlowe.” (Quote from the Elliott Gould/The Long Goodbye chapter of my book Starlight Rising, available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

Friday, November 16, 2018

Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, new
each Friday.NOTE:Nosh 132 will appear on Friday, Nov. 30.

APPETIZER: Reviews of Beautiful
Boy and Tea With the Dames

Beautiful
Boy

Playing the drug-addicted drummer Frankie Machine in The Man With the Golden Arm (1955),
Frank Sinatra looked tortured by his own gaunt, stringy physique. His writhing heroin
hell shocked viewers but didn’t get the expected Oscar (losing to Ernest
Borgnine’s lovelorn butcher Marty, as
did James Dean in East ofEden). Director Otto Preminger ram-jammed
the jazz (great score), a predatory creep (Darren McGavin), Frankie’s women
(deceitful, cloying Eleanor Parker and naïve, moony Kim Novak) and his “cold
turkey” agony. The spirit of harsh melodrama has haunted drug drama ever since,
but Beautiful Boy does not succumb.

There is a supple spine of substance: exceptionally
fine performances by Steve Carell as Bay Area writer David Sheff and Timothée
Chalamet as his teen, then 20s son, the addict Nic. Derived from their separate
memoirs, the movie has flashbacks to adorable kid Nic and his devoted father.
Then Chalamet takes over with the seemingly infallible, not smug naturalness
that made him so very special in Call Me
By Your Name. He looks like a Vogue
revival of Donatello’s David, and the contrast with Carell’s rather pinched,
regular-guy visage is a bonus. It underscores and resonates the emotional bond,
as talented Nic spins off on hooked highs and bottom-crawling lows (mostly from
crystal meth, which can damage the brain disastrously).

There is not much psychologizing, more the anguish of
unknowable motives (Amy Ryan as Nic’s mom and Maura Tierney as his stepmother
are touching but fairly marginal). Timothy Hutton, beautiful boy of a past era,
appears as a meth expert, like a shrunken echo of Judd Hirsch’s therapist role
in Hutton’s 1980 breakthrough, Ordinary
People. In and out of treatment (the phrase “relapse is part of recovery”
is not consoling), running to and from the family, Nic drives David nearly mad
with bewildered anxiety. Their mutual love and guilt form an almost toxic
double-helix. The confrontation in a San Francisco coffeehouse is among the
greatest father-and-son scenes on film.

Belgian director Felix Van Groeningen maintains the potent
core, with softening touches like Marin County vistas and sun-dappled shots of
the woody-modern home. Some music inserts feel generic, though several rock
tunes and “St. James Infirmary” (not Satchmo’s classic version) and Perry
Como’s “Sunrise, Sunset” are effective. Carell, subtle even when he did broad
comedies, has become a remarkably genuine, focused actor, and Chalamet proves
again that Adonis looks need not muzzle talent. This is a family film about
drug addiction, but anyone who calls it a soaper is blowing bubbles.

Tea With
the Dames

The old chums often leave sentences unfinished, fall
into silences, lurch into private giggles. Eileen Atkins, 84, and Judi Dench,
83, and Maggie Smith, 83, gather again at the lovely country home of Joan
Plowright, who is blind, near-deaf and 88. There she lived with husband Lord
Laurence Olivier, and her look-back love has flecks of ambivalence (“Yes, he
was tricky,” chimes in Maggie). These elevated but unpretentious Dames of British
acting seem beyond any direction from Roger Michell, though he made the great
Austen film Persuasion (1995) and
Peter O’Toole’s last fine one, Venus (never mind Hyde Park on Hudson, with Bill Murray’s inane FDR). This chatty occasion
is Tea With the Dames – Dench, Smith
and Plowright once starred in Tea With
Mussolini.

Most senior and limited, Joan presides with dowager
dignity. Judi is still spunky and flint-eyed. Eileen preens that while she was
never thought very pretty, she was “sexy” (clips prove it). Maggie is reliably
funniest, sprinkling the dry wit that has given her the best senior career.
Blithely she recalls Olivier slapping her hard during Othello (“It was the only time I saw stars at the National
Theatre”), and admits never watching Downton
Abbey, although “they sent me the box set.” Actor gossip sometimes hangs
moss, some anecdotage is in its dotage, but the foursome is more than old
crumpets. Clips include marvels, like teen Judi in a medieval mystery play,
seen silent (she recalls her lines from 1951). By day’s end the weary Dames seem
lame, drooping over their flutes of champagne. Inevitably, the final words are
Shakespeare’s: “Our revels now are ended …”

SALAD(A List)

Maggie
Smith’s Ten Best Film Vehicles

As listed by my taste: Gosford Park, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, Othello, Harry
Potter series, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, A Room With a View, Hot Millions,
The Pumpkin Eater, A Private Function, The Lady in the Van.

WINE (Vin
Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Though
often disparaged as a remainder-shelf variant on Citizen Kane, Welles’s Mr.
Arkadin has always had fans. Like me, and Cuba’s brilliant Guillermo
Cabrera Infante. In 1956 he caught the virus of this breathless, tab-noir dream:
“The film is like a gigantic cobweb in which Welles, a bearded spider, weaves
his plot of intrigues, deceits and lies … a kaleidoscope of signs, like a brainteaser
of clues. The truth rises up in fragments, is shattered, is recomposed, finally
is discovered whole. And the labyrinth is the only guide to the mystery of
art.” (From Cabrera Infante’s rich, strange book of critical pieces, A Twentieth Century Job. The movie is best
seen in a splendid three-version set from Criterion.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

Never
at home in Hollywood, even during his smitten, mostly hidden romance with Tab
Hunter, Anthony Perkins fled in 1957 to star in Broadway’s Look Homeward, Angel: “His dreamy Eugene Gant ‘shattered the
audience,’ said co-star Arthur Hill. Loving his Tony-nominated role, Tony was
aware of ‘a certain boyish charm I’m cashing in on.’ His perpetually virginal
nerves hung like tassels. ‘You were always aware,’ said Buck Henry, of Perkins
as ‘the watcher, almost the voyeur of his own experience.” (From the Tony Perkins/The Trial chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies,
available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

Tell me you are man enough for another submarine
action movie. You’d better be woman
enough, too, for what could rouse any gender better than an Arctic Ocean dive
by a giant atomic sea-phallus? There is a male frisson to this occasion. Told that his assignment could trigger
World War III, a burly commando thinks briefly of peace, then grunts “Fuck it.
I’d rather go kick some ass.”

A coup-minded Russian general kidnaps his peacenik President
at a big Commie (oops, Russian) naval base. Our own Chairman of the Joint
Chiefs (Gary Oldman, seizing his
check) is ready at once to go Def Con-die!
But our President (Caroline Goodall), being female and reality-rooted, says
let’s go on high alert while sending in the nuke sub Arkansas to rescue the Russian leader, aided by a team of the
bravest, hunkiest, hairiest Seals. Arkansas
Capt. Joe Glass, who “never went to Annapolis,” is fresh in command but hormonally
ready for the big show. In the mall food court that is modern stardom, Gerard
Butler is a solid slab of manloaf (weren’t fabled Clark Gable and Burt Lancaster
doing similar jaw locks and steel stares in Run
Silent Run Deep?). Butler has a command station so crammed with tech gizmos
that even James Mason’s visionary Capt. Nemo (20,000 Leagues Under the Sea) would grow gills of envy.

OK, it’s a waterlogged fleet of clichés, including a
depth-charge attack, torpedo evasions, an ocean-bottom landing, combat midway
between a video game and a recruiting poster. It is almost a cousin to Ice Station Zebra (absurd, but Howard
Hughes’s favorite movie). I fell many fathoms into it. Sixty years ago this
movie would have intoxicated me, and boyish brain vapors remain to rouse the inner
aquatic beast. Down Periscope (see
list below) parodied the submersible genre for all time. Hunter Killer blows a manly kiss at self-parody, then sails gung-ho
into the dangerous deep.

The
Sisters Brothers

There have been many oddball Westerns, the dusty genre
that keeps dying but mutating. Such vivid curiosities as Three Godfathers, Lust for Gold, Track of the Cat, The Baron of
Arizona, Heller in Pink Tights, The Ballad of Cable Hogue, Barbarosa, Viva
Maria!, Duck You Sucker, The Missouri Breaks, Dead Man and Meek’s Cutoff (the best and most
beautiful is Altman’s McCabe and Mrs.
Miller). The quirky-branded herd is joined by The Sisters Brothers. Dreamy slob Eli Sisters (John C. Reilly) and his
alcoholic brother Charlie (Joaquin Phoenix) are killers-for-hire, bonded by
blood, body odor and saddle-sore humor.

During an Oregon gold rush they track the dreamy immigrant
Herman K. Warm (Riz Ahmed) and well-spoken conniver John Morris (Jake
Gyllenhaal). French director Jacques Audiard films as if the Western myth were
a pile of quaint bones he found in a cinematheque
crypt. His eccentricities include a chemical potion for finding gold in
streams, a massive bordello madam who doubles as mayor, a spider crawling into
sleeping Eli’s mouth, a tender salute to ole Mama Sisters, a speechless coffin cameo
by Rutger Hauer (from Blade Runner to
this?), and Eli’s most poignant request
to Charlie, “Don’t puke on me.”

The actors ride this round-up at a slightly oafish gallop,
stuck with a tumbleweed plot and some garbled dialog. There is fine use of
light and night, creek and canyon by cinematographer Benoit Debie. But this strange
Euro-cruise into the Old West is a burro to park behind the barn, like a jokey
gift for the rawhide ghosts of Strother Martin and Slim Pickens. They will both
cackle, and spit some chaw.

Getting
his friend Marlene Dietrich to do a witty cameo in Touch of Evil (1958) was a plum coup for Orson Welles, who looked
back fondly years later: “We were well along before I even thought it up … I
think that Dietrich part is as good as anything I’ve ever done in movies. When
I think of that opening in New York, without even a press showing! She really
was the Super Marlene. Everything she has ever been was in that little house
for about four minutes.” (From the Welles/Bogdanovich This is Orson Welles.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

If
an actor delves deep into a part, it is often because the part delves deeply
into the actor, as with Harry Dean Stanton in Paris, Texas: “The movie streams,
yet ‘seamless’ is too smooth a term for both the process and result. Truth
rises as vents of inner pressure, in a tri-tonality of silence, speech, music.
After the shoot, Stanton happily told reporter Patrick Goldstein of ‘finally
playing the part I wanted to play.’ He had found ‘a tremendous amount of me in
that character,’ indeed ‘all my feelings about innocence, children, Nastassja
(Kinski), having a brother … it’s the story of my life here we’re talking about.” (From the Harry Dean Stanton/Paris,Texas chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies,
available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

Tuesday, October 30, 2018

Some documentaries grab a piece of reality that makes
most fictional films seem like spun taffy. Free
Solo grabs a huge granite slab, El Capitan in Yosemite Valley. On June 3,
2017, Alex Honnold became at 32 the first solo climber to scale its 3,000 feet
of sheer, vertical fear, without ropes or grips. His astonishing, almost four-hour ascent is
compressed into the final 20-some minutes of Free Solo, among the most nerve-wracking experiences I’ve ever had with
a movie. I guessed that Honnold would make it – few documentaries star athletic
failure – but as I watched, spellbound, I
really wasn’t sure.

Even some veteran camera crew, nerves taut, found it
hard to keep watching as Alex, tiny in a red shirt on a vast gray wall, overcame
many danger points. He had been a reclusive Sacramento kid, born to a
non-hugging mom and a restless, Asperger’s father. Dropping out of Berkeley, Alex
found the mountains. On solo climbs, including Yosemite’s Half Dome, “I walk
through the fear until it’s just not there anymore.” This requires subtle
muscle, steel nerve, cold reflex, eagle sight, perfect timing, laser thinking. One
tiny error can bring death (this physically beautiful movie is not for anyone who
fears altitude).

The National Geographic production is from Jimmy Chin
and Elizabeth Vasarhelyi, who made the great Himalayan documentary Meru. Its best tactic is the overlap of
two major life tests: the amazing climb, after injuries and delays, and shy-macho
Alex finding a girlfriend. With radiant Sanni McCandless the soloist risks ascending
that most humanly exposed peak, Mt. Romance. Both fear that their relationship could
blunt his edge and alter his crucial focus (Sanni’s effort to mask her anxiety
is endearing). Free Solo takes us
high, in more than one direction. These heights have depth.

The Old
Man & the Gun

Robert Redford was a virtual anti-Brando. You didn’t
go to Redford for raw fury or bared soul, but there was a quiet command in his golden
looks, his sculpted assurance, his engaging guy-ness. Now 82, his face a crinkled
weather map of sun exposure, he still has his bone structure, his great smile
and his wry, infallible charm. Playing bank robber Forrest Tucker (no, not the
big, hearty studio actor and totem of dinner theater), Redford is impeccably at
home in David Lowery’s The Old Man &
the Gun, based on a 2003 New Yorker
piece by David Grann.

This is not an old star’s glory like The Straight Story (Richard Farnsworth), The Two of Us (Michel Simon), The Late Show (Art Carney) or Lucky (Harry Dean Stanton). Still, it’s
an enjoyable Bob Redford movie, as Tucker robs banks with a light touch (just
showing his smile and pistol) in the 1980s. He was a real guy (1920-2004), since
his teen years a crook and escape artist (17 successful breakouts, including
once from San Quentin via kayak). Tom Waits and Danny Glover are like two soft
shoes as his backup buddies, and as the Texas cop tracking him down Casey
Affleck uses his gentle, slow-drag voice as if anticipating old age.

The best (no surprise) is Sissy Spacek. As Jewel, an
aging horse lover and smart but not pushy sweetheart, she gets dapper, gracious
Forrest to consider retirement. She and Redford are paired aces, even in the creaky
scene of them rocking on a porch, chewing some sunset wisdom. The heists are almost
endearing, with frisky chases, and we snatch glimpses of young Bob in photos
and The Chase (also Warren Oates in Two Lane Blacktop). This picture may have
AARP bones, but it sure beats meditating on Golden Pond with Norman and Ethel,
waiting for the loons.

Rumors
long circulated about whether publisher W.R. Hearst and famed paramour Marion
Davies ever saw Citizen Kane, partly
based on them. Respected Hollywood columnist Jim Bacon said Davies “once told
me that she and W.R. saw the famous Orson Welles movie seven or eight times.
She said ‘Once we even went into a theater in San Francisco, ate popcorn, and
watched it with an audience. W.R. loved it, and we laughed at the reference to
Rosebud.’ Then she told me that Rosebud was Hearst’s pet name for her
genitalia.” Now that’s gossip! (Quote from Harlan Lebo’s Citizen Kane: A Filmmaker’s Journey.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

When
the unreleased The Producers hit the
screen at Paul Mazursky’s small, private “sneak” on Jan. 13, 1968, “Peter
Sellers began convulsing with laughter. At the end he phoned Embassy Pictures
head Joe Levine in New York, declaring Mel Brooks’s comedy (which Levine had
pegged a dud) the funniest movie ever made. Soon Sellers placed trade ads to
herald ‘the ultimate film, the essence of
all great comedy combined in a single motion picture … a largesse of lunacy
with sheer magic.” Sellers’s giddy gladness rescued the movie from the
era’s discard pile.” (From the Zero Mostel/ The
Producers chapter of my book Starlight
Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

Friday, October 19, 2018

NOTE: I was a little glib in my treatment of Michael Moore's glib comparison of Hitler and Trump in my Sept. 28 review of Fahrenheit 11/9. For an in-depth comparison, read Christopher R. Browning's essay "The Suffocation of Democracy" in the Oct. 25 issue of the New York Review of Books.

APPETIZER: Reviews of First
Man and Colette.

First Man

The human factor barely factors in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Its most famous
voice is a computer. In First Man, which
builds to the July 20, 1969 lunar landing (15 months after 2001’s premiere), much of the talk is techie but the movie is
consistently human. The best element of this work from director Damien Chazelle
(La La Land, Whiplash), scripted by
Josh Singer from James R. Hansen’s book, is its thoughtful balance. The space
training and brave piloting of the first moon-walker, Neil Armstrong (Ryan Gosling), interlace with family
scenes. Much of the emotive vitality comes from Neil’s wife Janet, played by
the slight but substantial, and moving, Claire Foy.

A whole lotta shakin’ is goin’ on, in a lot of rough
rides, starting with Armstrong steering the supersonic X-15 plane 120,000 feet
(23 miles) down, from the rim of our atmosphere to the flat Mojave Desert. Mission
accomplished, he returns to find that his little daughter will soon die of a
brain tumor. A shadow of grieving memory follows the methodical, introspective,
slightly boring Armstrong. The story is dense with slide-rule guys, men with white
shirts, level hair, slim-Jim ties and cool control (the sparky contrast astronaut
is Corey Stoll’s “Buzz” Aldrin). As Neil rises to become top space cadet for
the Apollo 11 voyage, Janet inhabits the uniform-like demeanor of the good
military wife, often kept in the dark yet holding the family (two surviving
sons) together. Once June Allyson did this type well. Foy, going beyond type,
is better.

Images often echo the Kodachrome snaps and home-movie
shots of the time, with JFK grainy on TV and ‘60s racial anxiety venting in Gil
Scott Heron’s funny, biting song “Whitey on the Moon” (NASA had a heavy lean to
crew-cut Caucasians). Gosling welds his low-key charisma into Neil’s progress, all
the way to the wild gray (lunar) yonder. It’s 239,000 miles of dangerous travel
(and back) to grab what looks like a sampling of cement dust, yet this is no
rocket-nerd manual. Kubrick’s 2001 remains
a visionary poem (ambitious, pretentious, gorgeous), but it doesn’t have Janet quietly
telling her younger son, “Your dad’s going to the moon.” Pause, then the boy
answers, “OK. Can I go outside?”

Colette

Might as well call it Keira! England’s fair Ms. Knightley is in almost every scene, in wow
outfits, in bravura hair-dos. She smokes, drinks, mimes, trans-dresses, seduces
women (and men), even flashes some breast. And if you imagine this is a deep portrait
of Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette (1873-1954), still perhaps France’s most beloved woman
novelist, then I’d love to show you a “razor-sharp documentary” on the
guillotine as “pioneer of the close-cut shave.”

Abandon all hope that the movie will replicate
Colette’s impeccable, nuance-scented prose, and you can relax into some fun. Director
Wash Westmoreland did the gay-themed The
Fluffer, Totally Gay! and the vanishing species film Gay Republicans. His Colette
has the oo-la-la oomph of a gay carnival ripping off Victorian corsets, as
“Gabri” advances from nature-loving, rustic girlhood to writing her first
novels about the provincial and then Parisian lass Claudine. Her pen flows like
wine, but her lordly sommelier is
first husband Henry. Known high and low as Willy, he is publisher, wit, party dynamo.
Alas, Willy never guzzles brandy with Toulouse-Lautrec, but he does pose as faux
“author” of Gabri’s scandalously successful Claudine.

The risky arrangement educates Gabri, who will finally
proclaim “I am Claudine!” without quite becoming Colette. She remains so very Keira,
so English, so cute when scrunching her nose or flashing bold smiles. After she
ditches Willy and his wild, wastrel ways, the story loses its stimulating polarity. It is admirable to film a
feminist empowerment picture, less so when your male piggy (brash, funny, even
poignant) is a more layered life package than your heroine. Dominic West’s supple,
often dominant performance means that Colette
basically swallows the champagne cork of its payoff: after Willy, Colette
claimed immortality by writing her best works. Much later, as the old but still
keen-eyed author of Gigi, she noticed
and helped lift to fame Audrey Hepburn.

The
Latin American wartime solidarity project It’s
All True, initially sparked by Nelson Rockefeller, was Orson Welles’s
downfall in the studio system: “On Nov. 30, 1942, with several producers and
potential backers in attendance, (new RKO
head Charles) Koerner held a screening of selections from 23 reels,
supplemented with such Brazilian hit songs as ‘Amelia’ sung by Chucho Martinez.
There were no takers. Welles sat uncomfortably tight.” Weeks later, fired by
RKO, Orson told his Mercury colleagues “we’re just turning a Koerner.” But so
ended his high time of upscale Hollywood filming, and so began the years of
maverick wandering, with pinched budgets and zero help from Nelson Rockefeller.
(Quote from Frank Brady’s Citizen Welles.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

Having
once aspired to being an artist, my favorite film treatment of one is 1959’s The Horse’s Mouth, which is “never
psycho-biographic and only flirts with the possibility of genius. The visual
style has some over-lighting (was it felt that deeper chiaroscuro would dampen
the comedy bits?). The shifts from comical to serious can seem at times
metronomic, yet Alec Guinness pulls it all together. At first he seems dashed
on screen like the opening brush strokes (with the titles). But then he presses
through the surface impasto to find the rich, complicated interior. The result
is much more than a jolly good time.” (From the Alec Guinness/The Horse’s Mouth chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies,
available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

DESSERT (An Image)

A great movie image is more than a still,
it’s a distillation.

Even a swank outfit can't keep Reggie Nalder from being a total creep in The Man Who Knew Too
Much (Paramount Pictures, 1956; director Alfred Hitchcock, cinematographer
Robert Burks).

David Elliott's book

About Me

David Elliott was film critic of the Chicago Daily News, USA Today, San Diego Union-Tribune, SDNN.com, The Reader (San Diego), and covered arts and entertainment for the Chicago Sun-Times. Retired but not hibernating, he lives in green Eugene, Oregon. (Photo by Travis Elliott.)